Casandra Ulbrich: The way Michigan funds its public schools is broken

Jul. 26, 2013

Casandra Ulbrich

Written by

Casandra Ulbrich

Detroit Free Press guest writer

To paraphrase Henry Mencken, for every complex problem there is a simple solution — and it’s wrong.

Such is the case of public school financing. By now you have heard that a record 55 school districts are operating in deficit. And you’ve heard many solutions to this problem — everything from emergency managers to dissolving school districts to establishing countywide districts. Recently, Gov. Rick Snyder announced a new work group aimed at identifying an “early warning system” for financially troubled school districts. Unfortunately, these so-called solutions are tantamount to treating a brain tumor with aspirin. They fail to address the underlying cause: Michigan’s public education structure and its funding mechanism are completely incongruent.

In 1994, Michigan voters approved Proposal A, a public-school-funding mechanism that essentially transferred responsibility of funding education from local districts to the state. Each school receives a “foundation allowance” for every student they teach. The more students in the school, the more funding received from the state.

The system can work as long as there is an adequate and stable number of students to maintain it. The same year that Michigan voters approved Proposal A, the state began to experiment with school choice, primarily in the form of charter schools, with 12 opening that first year. Fast forward 20 years, and Michigan will soon have more than 300 taxpayer-funded charter and cyber charter schools, most of which are operated by for-profit companies.

The state Legislature has eliminated limits on the number of new charter schools that can be created, and reduced geographical limitations, while rejecting calls for quality as a requirement to open new schools. The Legislature also expanded the number of online charter schools in Michigan and increased the enrollment limits, despite a lack of any evidence of their results. With each new school created in Michigan, student head count becomes increasingly unstable for community-based schools.

Michigan has seen a decline in student enrollment of more than 183,000 students. At the same time, we have seen a net gain of more than 110 charter schools. Next year, Michigan is slated to open more than 30 new charter schools, despite a continuing decline in the number of students statewide. This is unsustainable. It’s not about ideology, it’s just common sense.

Rather than creating more schools to support fewer students, let’s place a moratorium on new school creation and focus on increasing the quality of the schools that already exist while identifying a funding system that makes sense. We can either have our current structure, or we can have our current funding system; we can’t have both. If you want an early warning system, look no further than the record number of districts currently in deficit. They represent the cracks in the foundation that, left untreated, will bring the whole thing crumbling down.